Director of AI Engineering (Transformation Team)

Join Mastercard as the Director of AI Engineering, where you will lead strategic change initiatives to reimagine how the company works and scales. You will collaborate with leadership, product, technology, and operations to design and implement new organizational models, embed AI across key workflows, and drive enterprise-wide transformation programs. Your role will involve developing and executing short-term and medium-term strategic plans for AI Engineering, overseeing the ML engineering lifecycle of AI/ML projects, and providing technical guidance and mentorship to senior technical leads. You will also contribute to organizational strategy by identifying emerging trends and evaluating new technologies.

• Develop and execute short-term and medium-term strategic plans for AI Engineering across Mastercard, aligning functional initiatives with organizational objectives.
• Collaborate with product and business leaders to translate organizational needs into scalable AI solutions and operational strategies, overseeing the ML engineering lifecycle of AI/ML projects.
• Lead cross-functional teams in optimizing, fine-tuning, and deploying models that meet performance, robustness, and ethical standards, ensuring operational stability, scalability, and compliance of AI/ML systems.

• Experience bridging model development and real-world application, translating AI capabilities into business impact
• Strong hands-on understanding of transformer architectures and generative AI, including fine-tuning, prompting, embeddings, and evaluation
• Comfortable operating in a fast-moving, evolving AI landscape with ambiguity and shifting priorities
• Solid engineering background, with familiarity in Python, ML frameworks (e.g. PyTorch/TensorFlow), and production deployment patterns
• Experience working with data engineering and MLOps practices to support training, evaluation, and inference at scale
• Excellent communication skills, able to articulate complex AI concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Strong stakeholder management skills, with the ability to align technical delivery to business priorities and measurable outcomes